Is it just "Tall poppy Syndrone" or is their a real conspiracy out there?

Why cant we be one big connected happy family?

Given a choice would you really switch to another OS system and why

Are you for or against the Bill gates Vison?
Posted by Mgsm Student (Member # 2685) on May 02, 2004, 18:22:

Is the best thing since Slice bread

Bring it on Billy
Posted by illuminatus (Member # 2187) on May 02, 2004, 20:45:

nothing is wrong with his vision it's his methods. the code is more jank than my own. that's just not cool.
Posted by Slurpy (Member # 2050) on May 03, 2004, 01:16:

When you have two thousand code monkeys all editing the kernel at once, you tend to get many, many errors. And the bigger the OS gets, as it has in each iteration so far (and likely will in the future), the more programmers you will need, and the more holes you will have.

That's what's so great about Linux; all the core files are controlled by a small group of people.
Posted by hey-U (Member # 2128) on May 03, 2004, 01:37:

True, software's rather porous but that's bound to happen with any piece of code and of course the bigger it gets the more can go wrong. Its my experience though that the biggest software problems arise between the keyboard and chair. My biggest issue with the evil empire is that its a money-grubbing horde just itching to stiffle the creativity and innovation of anyone but itself. M$ has and will continue to lie cheat and steal to glut itself on the corpses of slain software projects/companies.
Posted by MacManKrisK (Member # 955) on May 03, 2004, 10:21:

quote:Originally posted by Mgsm Student:Whats wrong with Microsoft ? [snip]Is the best thing since Slice bread

No, really Microsoft do have their good points. They produce in the main on the pc the best software.

Maybe not fastest, although Visual Studios compiles faster and smaller code than GNU stuff (atleast the last bench marks I looked at, which in all fairness was a few years back).

Maybe not the most stable, although Ive had my Linux install crash about the same amount as my win98 SE install, not including crashes from my own programming .

However they do look at the software from the users view. I mean Eric Raymond pointed out himself recently that GNU/Linux is nigh on useless for the average computer user compared to how easy they can get microsoft products to work.

Not only that but the rumour is that the microsoft games division actually treats its game developers as people!!!! Which would be a nice change for most developers and their publishers

Lets not forget the X Box here either, I know most people dont like the original controllers but its just the stuff for people who find most Japanese controllers too small!

I know some if not most of Microsofts buisness practices are dodgy to say the least, however some of the more well known cases imo are a joke (such as the recent horrors of microsoft including a browser and a media player in their OS which makes life for us users absolutely terrible!!).

The only real gripe with Microsoft is the lack of show us the code mentallity. Visual Studios might be great but there are a few things Id like to change that the scripting langauge and add ins cant do. The same for some of their other sodtware pieces.

The again I did used to gripe against Microsoft too, but they won me round with DirectX and Visual Studios (I just love how much cleaner directx is than opengl!!!). The real shame is that they dont share their UI research with enough people. All that money *sniff*
Posted by Flashfire (Member # 2616) on May 03, 2004, 12:14:

Microsoft makes very, very good applications. Excel is an absolute godsend at times, same with Word (though I don't like the fact that you can only ever save to the native file format in both those programs). They also make very good games, like Age of Empires and the MS Flight Simulator, mainly helped along by DirectX (which has finally become faster than OpenGL ).

However, they should have stayed out of the O/S business. I wholeheartedly agree with Neal Stephenson's take on the matter from In the Beginning was the Command Line -- Microsoft is trying to treat its O/S too much like an app, which it isn't, and never wil be. I think that's why people resent them so much -- they're trying to apply a traditional business model to a product that is no way traditional.

They should leave the O/S programming to those masochists who like that sort of thing... Posted by littlefish (Member # 966) on May 03, 2004, 14:34:

quote:Microsoft makes very, very good applications. Excel is an absolute godsend at times, same with Word

May I ask what you do with these programs, and what alternatives you have used? If you write letters and add numbers, then I suppose they may work for you, but anything slightly more complex, and all they want to do is mess up your work.

"It looks like you're writing a letter- I'll reformat it for you""It looks like you're writing a list- I'll reformat it for you""You've entered 3 numbers in a cell, and as such it may be a date, so I'll change it to a date. Try to stop me by changing the cell type to text, and I'll lose all your data""You have tried to average more than twenty numbers. nobody sane needs to do that, so I won't let you."

All of these are problems I have encountered. The problem with MS software is that it tries to help you. The computer will try to change any data format it doesn't understand into one it does, and as it doesn't understand what I do, it always fscks it up. I know it is possible to turn off all the "autocorrect" features and I have. But I still don't trust it.

Which is why my thesis will be written in LaTeX.
Posted by Callipygous (Member # 2071) on May 03, 2004, 16:29:

I would question too the statement that they look at software from the user's point of view. While an application that does as much as Word will always be complex, it is unnecessarily hard to learn. It is usual in Word (and most other MS apps) to find a quite commonly used feature buried behind a tab of a submenu of an option. Take for example the number of screens you go through to add a new address to any of their e-mail clients, (and once you've done it don't forget to hit the save button or you have to re-enter everything). I doubt that they spend a fraction of the time and money on making Word usable, that they spend on ensuring that nobody else's apps can work with their files. If you want to understand how intuitive user friendly software should be written, you should look at the platform which pioneered this notion, the Mac. Then you will appreciate how ugly most MS product is.

What is wrong with MS is their primary aim is (and has always been) domination, not the production of good software. As a result the best versions of their apps are written while they try to gain market leadership. Once they have got that, their focus changes to locking you in to their product, and seeing how much money they can extract from you.

The other thing wrong with MS and their product is that they just have no style.
Posted by GMx (Member # 1523) on May 03, 2004, 17:41:

What is this Microsoft? I've never heard of them. Posted by greycat (Member # 945) on May 04, 2004, 05:43:

Whats wrong with Trolls ?

Why cant we be one big connected happy family?

Posted by FatGnome (Member # 1068) on May 11, 2004, 14:29:

Microsoft just has grown too big. Which in some ways is good. I mean it gives them a way in which everyone can run the same application if they so choose, and someone to sue when it doesn't work. Also it has so much coding in it that every time you patch one hole it grows a new one, usualy a biggerone because no one knew that changing x would effect n.